Book Summary Preview : How To Work With Just About Anyone

Big Idea
Because every office has that one difficult person to work with, who affects overall productivity due to a terrible attitude, chronic tardiness, or simply drives everyone else up the wall. Here is the answer to common problems in conflict management. Dealing with negative behavior whether at work or at home can be solved with three steps:

• Get to the heart of the matter.
• Determine what problem-solving methods to avoid so you don’t perpetuate the conflict.
• Choose a different, surprising approach to solve the problem and keep it solved.

Finally, here is your key to sanity in the workplace, drawn from forty years of research and professional experience in consulting on the prevention and management of nonproductive behavior.

1. The Care and Feeding of Problems: How Difficult Behavior Gets Reinforced

How do we deal with the chronic offenders? We all know the type, the manager who rushes you on a project, then doesn’t bother to read the completed report and it sits on her desk for weeks. There’s the colleague who criticizes you in front of the boss, or the otherwise good assistant who is chronically late.

Brief Therapy
This is a method resulting from four decades of research at the Mental Research Institute (MRI) in Palo Alto, primarily from the Brief Therapy Center project. This became the formula for resolving problems quickly. The Brief Therapy Center’s method works in solving conflict in workplace settings as well as with individual and family difficulties.

Findings from the research:

• People often get stuck in problems because they choose a solution that doesn’t work.
• The wrong solution just prolongs the problem.
• Problems disappeared when the focus shifted to these ineffective solutions rather than on the original problem; and clients were convinced to try something significantly different
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